The Spring Festival holiday ended unconsciously, as major companies returned to work, a variety of revelations followed, some mobile phone manufacturers also began to gradually adjust their 2022 strategy, to new areas of marching, very familiar with the mobile phone market friends, may be able to guess who Xiao Lei is talking about, yes, is a plus.
As a brand that made a name for itself in overseas markets and then focused on the domestic market, OnePlus has been known for its performance flagship for many years, and "no will" is a well-known label. In 2021, OnePlus announced the merger with OPPO and returned to the OPPO system, and Liu Zuohu, the founder of OnePlus, took over the product planning and experience of OPPO as early as October 2020, becoming the helmsman of OPPO products.
With the big change of the person in charge and the merger of the R & D team, the products of the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 10 series have gradually begun to shift in style, and the OnePlus 9 series focuses on imaging technology and cooperates with the famous camera manufacturer Hasselblad to create an exclusive image mode. Overall, the OnePlus 9 series continues the design and product ideas of the previous generation, and in the subsequent OnePlus 10 series, we have seen a completely different flagship product, a more radical design and a completely different product line, which makes us realize: "The new one plus is coming."
Time to February 7, 2022, the first day of work after the Spring Festival holiday, the new head of OnePlus China Li Jie released an internal letter, mentioning the direction of OnePlus in 2022, as if from the previous performance flagship + image, to the performance flagship + game, although the image still has Hasselblad's blessing, but more energy will be focused on the game experience.
oh? OnePlus wants to enter the gaming mobile phone market? This is quite unusual, after all, in recent years, in addition to the game mobile phone market in addition to the black shark, red devil, savior, ROG and other brands specializing in the game mobile phone market, in fact, there are not many players left, full of full counts will also add a red rice K40 game enhancement version.
At this time, what does OnePlus want to do?
OnePlus enters the gaming mobile phone market?
According to the "2021 China Game Industry Report" released by the Game Working Committee of the China Music and Digital Association and the China Game Industry Research Institute, the actual sales revenue of China's game market in 2021 will reach 296.513 billion yuan, of which mobile games are still the mainstream of China's game market, accounting for 76.06% of its revenue.
Behind the hundreds of billions of revenues, the proportion of mobile game users in the Chinese game market is extremely high, according to statistics, the total scale of domestic game users is 666 million, of which 656 million are mobile game users, in short, mobile game users, accounting for 98.498%.
The huge number of mobile game users has naturally spawned a targeted mobile phone category - game mobile phones, and The black shark, red devil, rescuer and ROG mentioned earlier by Xiao Lei are among the best, and they all have their own characteristics. For example, the Deep Customization System of the Black Shark and the excellent shoulder key design, the active heat dissipation design of the Red Devils and the Rescuers, and the avant-garde design of ROG, etc., all make gamers marvel after the experience.
However, the sales and market performance of the game phone itself is not optimistic, after experiencing the big outbreak in 2019, the game phone has been going down the road in 2020 and 2021, with fewer new products and less publicity, so that many people have begun to forget the existence of this category.
Even the black shark with the best reputation and sales was once rumored to sell tencent to the field of VR equipment, as for the Red Devils, Rescuers, etc., it maintained its own tepid heat, and only had a high degree of recognition among the heavy mobile game population.
In fact, gaming phones have always faced a dilemma: how to distinguish them from performance flagship phones? The answer given by the gaming phone brand is: shoulder button, special charging interface design and stronger heat dissipation. However, these designs require the gaming phone to compromise on weight, thickness and interior space in exchange for the general grip and other features that are "enough".
The special design that sacrifices other experiences is difficult to be reflected in ordinary games, such as the shoulder button, which is not used in non-FPS mobile games. In the "2021 China Game Industry Report", mobile game players mainly prefer role-playing games, card games and strategy games, and although FPS mobile games contribute a lot of revenue, the overall number of players is not dominant.
As for the charging interface and heat dissipation, it is indeed just necessary for players who play games for a long time, but the positioning of the mobile game itself is a fragmented game mode, how many people will play games for hours or even ten hours in a row? Most of the mobile game players That Ray knows, including The Glory of Kings players, are actually taking time out of their leisure time to play, and rarely play for hours in a row.
So it seems that super heat dissipation and high endurance are pseudo-demand? Otherwise, for heavy mobile game players, especially the heavy players and anchors of "Peace Elite" and "Glory of the King", the game mobile phone is also just needed to some extent, but the proportion of this part of the player is not enough to support a huge game mobile phone market, for most ordinary players, a performance flagship mobile phone is enough to meet the demand.
It can be said that it is not a good choice to enter the game mobile phone market today, but it may be a good choice to make a performance flagship mobile phone with a full game experience. Most of today's performance flagships, in order to take into account the use experience of modules such as battery life and imaging, often make certain restrictions on the performance release of the processor, and the thin and light fuselage also makes the heat dissipation face certain difficulties, so in terms of game experience, today's flagship mobile phones are not outstanding.
In the internal letter, Li Jie believes that today's performance flagship mobile phones cannot bring excellent experience to users in some high-frequency scenarios. For example, "Original God" and other applications with high performance requirements on mobile phones, most flagship mobile phones will quickly appear overheating and frequency reduction after playing for a period of time, in response to this problem, OnePlus uses HyperBoost full-link game frame stabilization technology on OnePlus 10 to stabilize the game frame number.
Therefore, rather than one plus entering the game mobile phone market, it is better to say that one plus intends to enhance the optimization of mobile phones in terms of games on the basis of the original performance flagship mobile phone. This road has actually been explored by many predecessors, such as the earliest iQOO series, such as OPPO's ACE series, which are based on the performance flagship to add game optimization technology to ensure the player's game experience through the combination of software and hardware.
Turning to the game field of OnePlus, to some extent, is also to avoid direct competition with OPPO's flagship Find series, and instead looking for its own advantage range, and OPPO's technology and achievements in game optimization and other aspects, combined with OnePlus' own hardware tuning, may be able to bloom different flowers.
At least as far as the current mobile phone market is concerned, if it can sit firmly in the first position of the game experience in the performance flagship, and attract the attention and purchase of a group of mobile gamers, OnePlus is still expected in the future.
So, the road that OnePlus wants to take, is there an advantage over traditional game phones?
Hardware first or a combination of hardware and software?
Coincidentally, on the same day that a plus internal letter was exposed, Lenovo officially released the internal heat dissipation design diagram of a new generation of rescuer game phone Y90, which can be seen that on the basis of the previous generation, Y90 once again increased the efficiency of the active cooling system, reduced the frost blade cooling system of the rescuer laptop and embedded it in the mobile phone, and used the active heat dissipation module of the double fan compared with the previous generation with 300% heat dissipation capacity improvement (official data).
In addition, Lenovo officially gave the data of the savior Y90 when running "Original God", which can maintain 20 minutes of frame operation without dropping frames in the case of the highest special effects, and the frame rate is stable at about 60FPS, while the temperature is 38.4 ° C. For comparison, the number of frames running "Original God" in game mode with HyperBoost full-link game frame stabilization technology is stable at about 45FPS, and the temperature is around 43 °C, and the gap between the two is indeed obvious.
It has to be said that active heat dissipation is always better than passive heat dissipation, which is beyond doubt, but behind the active heat dissipation is that the mobile phone needs to make great sacrifices in other aspects of the experience. Taking the thickness of the fuselage as an example, from the Red Devils to the Rescuer, in order to carry the active heat dissipation module, they have to increase the thickness of the fuselage, and the thickness of the Rescuer Esports Mobile Phone 2Pro is 9.9mm, as a comparison, even if the iPhone 13 Pro is not based on thinness and lightness, the thickness is only 7.65mm.
To tell the truth, as far as Xiao Lei's personal trial experience is concerned, the 9.9mm thickness of the mobile phone in the case of one-handed holding, the use experience is really bad, only the horizontal grip when the feel is qualified, in the case of other mobile phones to choose, Xiao Lei basically will not use it as a daily machine.
Although, from the perspective of game experience, the game phone is definitely better than the performance flagship phone, and the game phone equipped with active heat dissipation can be called the best mobile game device. However, users need to endure multiple problems such as hand feel, battery life, and the noise of the active cooling module, unless they are heavy mobile game enthusiasts, most users may not consider this type of mobile phone.
And what about the OnePlus 10 series? For most players, the mobile game experience does not need to pursue the ultimate frame rate, only need to play with the hand, will not drop the frame, will not stutter, will not heat up, then one plus 10 series meet the requirements? Little Ray thinks it is in line.
However, one thing that needs to be pointed out is that the frame stabilization technology of the OnePlus 10 series has not opened a significant gap between it and other flagship mobile phones at the same level, and the performance settings that are too stable have suppressed the performance release of the processor, and the trade-off between performance and temperature will be a problem that OnePlus needs to further consider.
Under the premise of ensuring that the product has a good basic experience as a mobile phone, through software optimization, system regulation and other ways, to allow mobile phones to provide players with a better experience in the game process, in fact, it may be the right way for traditional mobile phone brands to build game phones.
So, is the path taken by the Savior Game Mobile phone wrong? Obviously not, but compared to mobile phones, Xiaolei prefers to call it a handheld game device, from design to hardware is a product for game services. In the future, with the advent of high-configuration games such as AR games, only these game phones may be able to truly meet our game needs.